The road to 2010: Critics and industry look back on the year and decade and look forward to the new year's releases, in particular, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which screens locally in January.

Thoughts On the Aughts: Best/Worst Trends

Susan GerardDecember 31, 2009

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

Best: New Argentine cinema. Worst: Less muppetry.Sean Uyehara, Programmer, San Francisco Film Society

Decade’s best/worst trends in feature filmmaking

Worst: Incessant remakes.Cheryl Eddy, Senior Editor, SF Bay Guardian

Worst: Shaky cams.Jeffrey M. Anderson, critic, Combustible Celluloid

Worst: Shooting on video.Chris Metzler, Tilapia Film

Worst: (for this year and the previous three decades) an “auteur-ish” desire for everyone to do everything. It’d be better to collaborate with folks that are good or perhaps great at their respective craft(s) rather than individuals to delude themselves that they can write, direct, edit and whatever else alone.Jonathan Marlow, Executive Editor San Francisco Cinematheque

You figure out whether it’s best or worst: Downloading and bit torrents.Marc Huestis, Outsider Productions

Best: More foundation support for docs! Worst: The glut of eco-oriented documentaries that have no story.George Rush, Law Offices of George Rush

The decade’s best/worst trends in documentary filmmaking

Best: The overall wider acceptance of documentaries as a genre that people will actually go to the theater to see or actively seek out on DVD. Michael Moore is at least partially responsible.Cheryl Eddy, Senior Editor, SF Bay Guardian

Best: Character driven, cinema v‚rit‚ documentaries. Worst: Documentaries in which the director is a character. Most documentarians are not Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore; more often then not they are more like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets.George Rush, Law Offices of George Rush

Worst: A glut of boring, hectoring political leaflets with no humor or cinematic imagination or respect for audience intelligence. Jonathan Kiefer, The Faster Times, KQED, San Francisco magazine, SF360.org

Best and Worst: VOD and digital distribution. Love it because film is easier to consume, but hate it because it makes it harder for filmmakers to make money.George Rush, Law Offices of George Rush

Best: Social video pranks.Sean Uyehara, Programmer, San Francisco Film Society

Best and Worst: The availability of a lifetime’s worth of viewing options in easily-replicated digital forms. A godsend for scholars, obsessives and couch potatoes, but a threat to public communal experiences watching niche-interest films.Brian Darr, Hell On Frisco Bay